Influencer marketing has been around for decades, but if you’re part of the 20% of marketers not using influencer marketing today, I believe you’re missing out. Check out the latest article from Social Jack! #InfluencerMarketing
Since TikTok launched in 2017, marketers have been trying to wrap their minds around the odd-ball video platform. Now, many are realizing that the key to brand awareness might involve sponsoring Influencer content on the app.
Why does this strategy make sense? There are a few great reasons why influencer marketing can be beneficial on a new or niche app like TikTok. Check out the newest article from Social Jack! #InfluencerMarketing
For years, marketers have debated the benefits of social media versus email marketing. However, in today’s multichannel and omnichannel environment, the reality is that brands must use both to engage and retain their audiences. According to the Marketing Rule of 7, consumers need to “hear” a message at least 7 times before taking the desired action. Combining email marketing with social media efforts allow brands to target their audience more frequently, ultimately moving them through the customer journey.
80% of marketers report that increasing brand awareness is their number one goal for using social media. By sharing great content, maintaining consistency, and listening to their audiences, brands can capture the attention of their share of the roughly 264 million people using social media in the US. Email marketing, on the other hand, is more successful at driving both consideration and conversions. Need proof?
Here are some quick facts about the difference between social media and email:
Social and email clearly have their individual strengths – which can be made all the more powerful by uniting the two for a more holistic approach to your marketing efforts. Read on for 6 ways to integrate social media and email marketing.
When you create a Facebook ad, you can choose between identifying an audience via Facebook’s targeting tools or you can use what is referred to as “custom audiences”. Custom Audiences allow you to reach customers you already know with ads on Facebook. When you upload a customer file, Facebook will identify those people (if they are on Facebook) and serve them ads.
This feature is a great way to engage with email subscribers on another channel. Encourage subscribers to consider your brand further by reminding them of the campaign messaging. You can target anyone on your email list, or choose to serve an ad to just those subscribers that have opened a recent campaign.
For detailed instructions on setting up your customer file custom audience, head over to Facebook help.
A Lookalike Audience is a highly effective way to identify and reach new prospects. These people are typically more qualified than a general audience because of the information that Facebook gathers on each of its visitors. (See the Sprout Social graphic to the right for more on what Facebook knows about us).
Once your customer file audience is created, you can create a ‘lookalike audience’ from the file. This audience will be filled with people who are likely to have an interest in your business because they have similar characteristics to your email subscribers. Lookalike audiences are not only a great way to reach new people, but also tend to be less expensive than audiences based on interest or behavior targeting.
It’s important to note that your customer file audience must have at least 100 people from a single country in order to use it as the source of the lookalike audience. Here are Instructions on setting up a lookalike audience.
BONUS TIP: Serve this lookalike audience a brand awareness campaign that drives them to a landing page that provides a piece of high-value content in exchange for their email address. Create an email list of these prospects and send them a welcome campaign that repeats your message.
Cultivating a large social media following is an important goal for many brands, but it shouldn’t be the channel you rely on to spread your messages. After all, you don’t own your social media followers – and they could be gone tomorrow. One of the best ways to create value for your brand from social media is to convert your following into email subscribers.
Create regular social posts that remind followers to sign up for your email list. Share a preview of the type of content shared in email campaigns, or offer an incentive for new subscribers. For example, hold a sale and let followers know they need to subscribe to learn the details of the promotion. Include an easy, frictionless link to your email sign-up.
Host a big giveaway. It isn’t always easy to get fans to leave Instagram or Facebook to sign up for a newsletter. Create an offer that they can’t refuse. Build a gift basket, free course or another high-value gift to promote on social media channels. Create a landing page on your website with the details of the promotion and an email opt-in form. Promote this giveaway regularly on your social channels over 4-6 weeks and really build up the buzz around this contest.
BONUS TIP: Partner with another brand or company and cross-promote the giveaway on both of your platforms. That way, you each get the benefit of the other brand’s followers. Just make sure the partner has a similar customer base.
Create value with gated content or discounts. Remember that an email address is valuable to your business, so offer something of value in return. This is often a discount for e-commerce (10, 15 or even 20% off their first purchase) and gated content for B2B. The primary focus of social posts offering gated content or discounts in exchange for an email is adding value.
BONUS TIP: Incentivize sharing. Create an additional discount or special offer for current email subscribers who share your post or newsletter on social. Ask subscribers to copy or tag you on their share so you can be sure to send them the extra treat.
User Generated Content (UGC) was one of the biggest marketing trends of 2018, and it isn’t going away any time soon. More than 86% of businesses are utilizing UGC as part of their marketing strategy. Consumers like the authenticity of UGC over standard brand posts. On average, UGC posts see a 28% higher engagement rate than any brand-created content.
In email campaigns, UGC is effective at serving subscribers with relevant, useful information about how products are used in real life. It also creates social proof, nudging engaged subscribers further along the customer journey.
Incorporate UGC into your email campaigns by sharing images from your fans at the footer of every email. When possible, use images that relate to the products or services you are promoting in your campaign. UGC can also become the primary focus of the campaign by including customer reviews and images and encouraging email subscribers to upload their own content.
BONUS TIP: Create a branded hashtag to engage your customers, tell them how to share their content, and make it easy for you to find.
The #treatyourselfie campaign from Skull Candy is a great example of an entire email campaign aimed at encouraging subscribers to engage with the brand on social media. Skull Candy uses their branded hashtag, #treatyourselfie to encourage subscribers to create and share user-generated content, tag Skull Candy and have the opportunity to win. For Toms, the campaign above is all about raising awareness for their charitable goals. While subscribers don’t get a discount or a prize, they do get to support a good cause.
Much like encouraging your social followers to become email subscribers, it is important to create value for the subscriber in exchange for engaging with your brand on social media.
Email subscribers are 3x more likely to share content on social media than customers or fans acquired from other channels. Encourage subscribers to like, follow and share by consistently reminding them how and where they can follow your brand on social media. Your email template should prominently display both social share and follow icons.
However, the most effective way to promote social media within an email is to create campaigns specifically with this goal. Both H&M and Handy are good examples of how brands can entice subscribers to engage on social media. They create value for their readers by showing them what they can expect to see on social media, and how it differs from their experience as an email subscriber.
Both social media and email marketing are key components of a well-rounded, holistic marketing strategy. While there are benefits to each, the real results are found when they are integrated to create a seamless customer experience. Make sure you are getting the most out of both channels by taking steps to ensure your email marketing and social media are working together.
We hope these tactics will help you to create more of a connection between these two channels. Have you found any other tactics successful in integrating social media and email?
The effectiveness of influencer marketing is not surprising, given that 92% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know and 70% trust the experiences of their peers. Utilizing this type of marketing approach drives awareness, cultivates an audience, and bolsters owned media over time. Check out the latest article from Social Jack! #InfluencerMarketing
According to a 2018 industry report by Social Media Examiner, 87% of all marketers indicated that their social media efforts generated more exposure for their businesses and 78% reported increased traffic to sites. Perhaps most importantly, more than half of marketers who’ve been using social media for more than 2 years reported it helped them improve sales.
However, as brands begin to see greater results and budgets increase, more pressure is put on marketers to prove ROI, stay ahead of the competition, and strategically align their efforts with business goals. Given these realities, it is more important than ever to assess your social media strategy and make sure it’s working for you. Below you will find 9 components that are critical to a successful social media strategy.
What is a social media audit?
An audit is a detailed look at current social media practices. Digging into the numbers will provide a clear look at what’s working, what’s failing, and what to improve. This lays the groundwork for identifying your goals and the steps required to reach them. It’s also an important way to identify opportunities and challenges.
According to Social Media Examiner, only 42% of marketers were able to keep a measure of their social media marketing activities. But how can you get the most out of your social media program if you don’t know what’s working?
Your audit should include the following:
Getting started on an audit can be a little overwhelming, so here are a few resources to help:
Once you’ve reviewed your own practices on social media, it’s time to look at competitors. This is a good way to see how you compare, and can also be helpful in identifying industry standards, trends, and threats. The first step is to identify which competitors you want to research. Pick 4-5 competitors, including brands that are bigger and smaller than yours.
For each competitor, ask yourself the following questions:
It is often difficult to see everything competitors do. Here are a couple tools to help with your research:
The cornerstone of any strategy is understanding what you are trying to achieve with your social media marketing. Without this, it’s easy to get caught up in the daily activities of content creation and posting while forgetting why you are doing all of this work in the first place.
The best goals are written and posted in a place you will see them every day. They should guide all of your campaigns, content creation, and community management activities.
To identify your social media goals, start by asking yourself the following questions:
The Metrics Map chart below is a great tool to use in aligning your business goals with specific social media activities. For example, to drive more traffic to your site from Instagram, you’ll need to set goals that relate to increased awareness and increased demand.
The map’s recommended social KPIs for these stages are impressions and engagements. Now that these metrics are identified, you can create S.M.A.R.T Goals for each of these buyer stages.
An audience persona is a research-backed profile of your ideal customer. A whopping 70% of people in North America use social media every day, but that doesn’t mean that you want to speak to all of those people. An audience persona will profile your ideal customer.
Furthermore, 80% of consumers say they are more likely to do business with a company if it offers a personalized experience. Personas also help to identify authentic and personalized opportunities to reach your customers through social media.
Use research and data from your social platforms, Facebook Audience Insights, Google Analytics, and your internal sales tools or CRM to find out more about your customers. While you are digging, ask yourself these questions:
Here are a couple resources to get started building your audience personas:
Showing up consistently on social media is an important tactic to increase trust and brand awareness among your audience. Consistent use of color alone can increase brand recognition by up to 80%. It can also help to drive revenue: consistent presentation of a brand increases revenue by roughly 23%, according to Lucid Press.
Your social media strategy should outline the look and sound of your brand across different platforms by identifying and recording the following items:
Here are some helpful resources to identify your brand guidelines for social media:
With a strategy framework outlined, you can start to detail the tactics required to engage your ideal customer, reach your goals, stand out from the competition, and reinforce your brand. Your content plan is the primary way to achieve all of these things. In 2018, marketers plan to increase their use of videos (77%), visuals (68%), live video (63%), blogging (57%), and podcasting (25%), in that order.
Social media content should be a mix of different types of content. One helpful guideline is the Rule of Thirds, which states that content should be ? promotional, ? curated and ? engagement based. Identify types of posts that fall into each of these categories. (There are some ideas in the chart above.)
Next, create a calendar to identify key dates and authentic opportunities to share content from each category. Pay close attention to make sure you aren’t overloading your feed with promotional content.
In today’s marketing environment, an integrated approach drives results. A well-integrated and customized campaign can boost effectiveness by 57%, according to AdReaction: The Art of Integration. This isn’t surprising, considering that 86% of shoppers are regularly channel-hopping across at least two channels (CommerceHub).
Despite all of this evidence, marketers are still struggling to integrate their channels.
Make a plan to cross promote your social media content. Your strategy should outline how you will share and promote social content via email marketing, website, direct marketing, and any other channels you are utilizing.
Almost all marketers report to someone, and that someone is going to want to know how much your strategy is going to cost. Although budgets differ across companies and industries, most companies spend about 5% to 15% of annual revenue on marketing. Social media is becoming a bigger piece of companies’ marketing mix. Social media spend is expected to increase 89% in next 5 years (see graph above).
Aside from your team (either internal or external), a social media budget should include resources for:
If you’ve never created a marketing budget before, here are a couple tools to help:
The last step of your social media strategy is to set up a way to track results. Create a template that records the KPIs identified when you set your goals. A good report will show progress (or lack thereof) over time. Reviewing reports on a quarterly or monthly basis can inform changes in strategy, new opportunities and areas for improvement.
Companies are investing more and more into social media programs, but many are still struggling to improve the channel’s impact. A recent study by eMarketer uncovered that 6 out of 10 small businesses find it difficult to track the ROI from their social media marketing efforts. And even a survey (reflected in the chart below) of CMO’s found that the impact of social media remains difficult to prove.
A strong social media strategy will identify the metrics that matter and help marketing teams to understand where they are creating an impact on the bottom line.
Need further guidance in taking your strategy to the next level? Attend a Social Media Strategy Summit to hear the latest in best practices from top brands across multiple industries.
A key part of many social media campaigns in today’s day and age is the power of Influencer Marketing. This form of marketing allows people to reach into their wells of power (AKA their network) and help sway opinion about a product or service that people should buy. What makes this interesting is that people are able to have more personal interactions with their audience members instead of doing a generic post. In order to use Influencer Marketing to its fullest potential, there are a few tips you should keep in mind.
In this episode, Neal Schaffer shares what he loves about Influencer Marketing. He explains the power it has and why so many people are jumping headfirst into it.
Make content, not war
Obviously, creating content is a key part of Influencer Marketing. You want to keep your network engaged with you by posting relevant, timely content; but, how do you present it to them? One way is a blog post. After all, a blog post allows you to be more personal and humanize whatever you talk about. However, there are various other effective ways that you can present content to your audience.
The other route you can take here is by developing visual content for your audience. You still need text for your social media post, but a visual can augment what you say very well! If you want to show off a product’s effectiveness, you can create a video to demonstrate it. Want to make a statistic really stand out? You can make a chart or an infographic to visualize the data! A photo can also help give some more ompf to your posts! Remember, you should make a post fun by doing something creative with what you offer or what people should know about. Make your content both clickable and engaging.
Influencer Pro Marketing Tip: Are you looking for ways to enhance your social media posts? Our Influencer Development Program will help you identify your target audience and then we can help you develop content that is both relevant and engaging!
Be an advocate of your work
Obviously, everyone wants to get invested in work that is meaningful to them. When that happens, employees tend to be very happy about where they work and essentially become an “ambassador” to their company and its brand. This is something that Schaffer called “employee advocacy.” The term essentially means that employees are representatives of the brand and can talk about in a positive light. This is something to leverage for your next Influencer Marketing campaign. If employees have a lot of followers, they can talk about their company. In doing this, they can get others to jump on board with the brand and use the services it sells. This goes to show how important employees can be online!
Influencer Marketing Pro Tip: If you are looking to sell a service on social media, look at your brand and the company’s brand. By seeing how you fit into the brand or why the brand matters to you, you can offer that personalized communication with customers. Customers like to see personality coming from a company because it once again HUMANIZES the brand. This will help you make those sales!
Employee Advocacy – LinkedIn
As the second most engaged social media network, LinkedIn is a great tool for employee advocacy. LinkedIn is a professional social media channel, so it makes sense to use employee advocacy here. On this channel, you are representing yourself, but also a company. In order to convince people to use any of your company’s services, you should show them why the company is great! Maybe your company is pushing a new environmental project or something that helps employees… talk about it! When people see your words, they can get a better idea of what your company’s values are and why they should get involved with them. This is the ideal channel to enhance the awareness and brand of a company while getting connected with other industry experts.
Influencer Marketing Pro Tip: Do you want to use employee advocacy on LinkedIn but don’t have an account or are lacking connections? Social Jack’s Influencer Development Program can help you build your profile and network so you can chat your company up!
In summary
Influencer Marketing is great because it allows you to get personal with your audience. You can do this by making your content more visual, grabbing the attention of your connections. The other thing that many people can do is employee advocacy. Happy and fulfilled employees are the best spokespeople for a brand, so you’ll want them to talk about your brand where they can! Finally, make sure you are on LinkedIn! This channel allows you to meet more connections but also allows you the perfect space to talk about your company and why people should use it!
Influence Factory LIVE airs Wednesdays at 12pm CST. Register here!
You can also subscribe to previous and upcoming shows on the Social Jack website.
We hope to see you in our next Influence Factory!
In July, I was given the opportunity to be one of the 26 influencers featured in Nimble’s latest eBook – “The Ultimate Influencer Playbook of 2018.” Of course, I took that opportunity to be put in the spotlight (well, that’s not the only reason why!). While it is certainly cool to be featured in what is essentially an Influencer Marketing Guide, I’m ecstatic that I’m able to share my knowledge and words of wisdom with my fellow influencers as well as marketers trying to navigate the world of influencer marketing. This advice, including the other Influencer Marketing do’s and dont’s addressed throughout the book by my peers, will ensure that reader’s Influencer Marketing campaigns are super successful.
Let me be the first to say, this book is awesome…it is split into different sections that break Influencer Marketing down as much as possible. The first one showcases absolutely outstanding Influencer Marketing campaigns that were proven to bring in success. Looking at these campaigns has given me new ideas for my brand – as an influencer, there is always room for growth!
After seeing these unbelievably amazing campaigns, the second section follows up with six “Influencer Marketing Strategies and Tips.” You will find my contribution to Pro Tip #4: Put an Offer on the Table, on page 18!
In my opinion, I feel that I have the most to say about this next section—”10 Surprisingly Common Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs.” No one likes to fail (although, we all need to at some point in order to learn, right?) On page 25, I discuss how crucial it is to have a Plan B. Having a backup plan is one of the easiest ways to avoid disappointment and failure within your campaign.
The following portion of the book is about building your “Influencer Marketing Toolbox.” I brought up two of my go-to tools that I constantly nag my social media team to use: Epictions and HashTagify.me. Epictions is an extremely neat app that shows us which groups of influencers are engaging conversations about specific topics, and which types of media better suit their specific needs. HashTagify.me helps us identify trends in hashtags, which most of you probably know are the easiest and more efficient way to connect to other people interested in what you’re talking about online. You type in a word or two that describes a topic, and it will spit out trending hashtags related to those subjects – certainly one of the most useful tools for influencers and marketers.
While reading the “Closing Thoughts” of this book, I felt #inspired. Even though myself and the other 25 influencers mentioned have been killing it out there, we never stop growing! Influencer Marketing is still quite new, meaning there is a LOT more to learn for all of us.
You can download The Ultimate Influencer Playbook of 2018 here, thanks to our friends at Nimble.
Thanks for the opportunity, Nimble, to be featured alongside some of the best in the bizz. Until next time, see you online!